Racism is not a new human tendency. Human social groups have ostracized outsiders since the beginning of history. In the past, hatred of "the other" has been justified by nationality, religion, customs, or appearance. Using science as a justification is relatively novel, a product of the past few centuries.

Racism, of course, is not possible without a concept of race. Baba and Darga (1981, p. 5) note that classification is a natural human tendency. Pigeonholing objects, plants and animals, and even people is an endeavor embedded in the human psyche, and that which does not fit clearly in any category is often oversimplified and forced to fit somewhere. Thus humans tend to group themselves into racial groups based on physical and cultural characteristics.

Most of these classifications incorporate some sort of ranking system. When such a ranking system is applied to classifications of human social groups, racism inevitably results.

Since racism arises from classifications, it is no surprise that biological racism may have begun with Linnaeus, the pioneer of biological taxonomy. He designated the human races as biological categories: European whites belonged to the category Homo sapiens europaeus while African blacks belonged to Homo sapiens afer. Linnaeus himself added ranking to his classification; he wrote that the former is "ruled by customs," the latter "ruled by caprice" (Gould, 1981, p. 35).

Yet the science of Linnaeus did not only help construct a difference between Africans and Europeans; it also contributed to the unification of the two. Both are included in the single species Homo sapiens, considered by Linnaeus to be immutable, like all species (Stanton, 1960, p. 3). In his theological context, this organization meant that the human species was originally created by God as one, that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve and share the grace of God.

As anthropology became more and more established as a science, racial classifications began to take on a greater degree of scientific authority. Quantitative measures began to be made of the morphology of human skulls. For example, Anders Retzius (1796-1860) perfected the measurement of the ratio of the length and width of the head, or cephalic index, and identified jaw shapes as being either prognathic (jutting forward) or orthogrnathic (sloping back) (Stanton, 1960, p. 25).

Quantitative measurements such as these were inevitably applied to racial analysis. The results of a measurement were generally expected beforehand because the scientists assumed the supremity of the white race. If a certain trait was considered more primitive than another, then since blacks were considered inferior, it was assumed that blacks must possess the more "primitive" of the two traits.

For example, in the late 19th centurey Paul Broca measured location the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes, of blacks and whites. The foramen is located under the skull in humans but behind the skull in most animals; therefore, the further back a person's foramen magnum was located, the more primitve that person must be. After measuring the location of the foramen and correcting for the length of the face, Broca found that in blacks, the foramen was actually farther forward than it was in whites, the opposite of the expected result.

Rather than reconsider the ranking system that placed whites on top, Broca merely redefined which result was "primitive" and which was "advanced," arguing that the location of the foramen in blacks was a result of their lesser brain size and thus lesser intelligence (Gould, 1981, p. 102). Regardless of what the data showed, they were always to be interpretted so as to place whites on top.

Since the superiority of whites was already universally assumed and accepted, the reason that some authorities used science to try to prove it may not be immediately clear. The need for scientific justification had several sources.

First, the authority of science was growing, as was the authority of anthropology as a scientific discipline. As a matter of course, this new authority was legitimized by demonstrating the correctness of the accepted social order.

Second, it was seen as necessary to the legitimization of slavery. Africans were enslaved for economic reasons, not racist ones, but continuation of the slave trade depended on the contention that Africans were inferior to Europeans (Hubbard, 1994, p. 12). Abolitionists, threats to the slave trade, often argued that Africans were not inferior, as Stanton (1960) points out, so it was seen necessary to try to prove unequivocally that they were.

In the modern era, racism is not as blatant or pronounced as it was in the 19th century, and researchers no longer set about trying to quantitively prove that one race is superior to another. Yet even today, scientists sometimes interpret data in such a way that the superiority of whites is subtly implied, perhaps unconciously.

For example, Hubbard (1994, pp. 14-15) criticizes modern studies that produce statistics stating that members of certain races are at a higher risk for various diseases than members of other races. She notes that these studies often only include data on age, race, and sex, without considering environmental factors such as income and employment. The studies imply that the increased risk of diseases is due solely to race, not to the fact that a larger proportion of minorities live in poor neighborhoods than whites. They therefore continue to construct the concept that problems experienced by some races are biologically determined, not due to environmental causes, and therefore can be used as a justification for racism.

These studies are a result of a determinist way of thinking. Many people, including scientists, operate under the subconscious assumption that all aspects of our lives are ultimately predetermined by our genetic makeup. If one group of people is at a higher risk for a particular cancer than another group, then it must be that the first group is genetically predisposed to that cancer. This way of thinking causes the reduction of complex systems in which genetics and environment interact intimately to a simple chain of cause and effect.

The attempts of scientists of the nineteenth century to codify the differences among the races demonstrate the assumption that races are static groups, and that every human can be unmistakenly placed in one and only one group. Hubbard (1994, p. 13) views the issue from the opposite extreme, stating that "as a biological concept, [race] has no meaning."

Neither of these views is wholly accurrate. There is more continual variation as well as interbreeding than some nineteenth-century scientists would admit, but at the same time, biology can identify some variation among the races, even as it notes that that variation is continuous.

Analyzing that variation accurately, however, is next to impossible. Different morphological traits often vary in different directions. For example, in Europe, melanin concentration varies from north to south, but the frequency of the blood type B allele varies from east to west (Baba and Darga, 1981, p. 9). These inconsistent variations render the defining of races based on morphological differences impossible.

Moreover, scientists are human beings rooted in their own cultural contexts, with their own racial identities. No human being is capable of objectively considering the issue of race; even the strictest scientist cannot keep out his or her own preconceived constructions of what the races essentially are. Therefore, when analyzing variations in the human population, science should stay away from reducing these variations to different races and instead consider the variations themselves independent of "race."

Baba, Marietta Lynn, and Darga, Linda L. 1981. "The Genetic Myth of Racial Classification." Pages 5-19 in Science and the Question of Human Equality (ed. Margaret S. Collins, Irving W. Wainer, and Theodore A. Bremner), Boulder: American Association for the Advancement of Science Selected Symposium Series.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Hubbard, Ruth. 1994. "Race and Sex as Biological Categories." Pages 11-21 in Challenging Racism and Sexism (ed. Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff), New York: The Feminist Press.

Stanton, William. 1960. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

© 1997, 1998 by Robyn Conder Broyles. All rights reserved.

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